This article explains the essential steps involved in manipulating the data in a MySQL database from a Java application. MySQL Connector/J JDBC driver was used in the example code to show the database connectivity, data manipulation steps. Application developers who are new to Java programming language [but not to MySQL database] are the target audience of this article.

Stay tuned for the next article in this series "Using MySQL with PHP" ..

While the costs of managing a data center are becoming a major concern with the increased number of under-utilized servers, customers are actively looking for solutions to consolidate their workloads to:

improve server utilization

improve data center space utilization

reduce power and cooling requirements

lower capital and operating expenditures

reduce carbon footprint, ..

To cater those customers, Sun offers several virtualization technologies such as Logical Domains, Solaris Containers, xVM at free of cost for SPARC and x86/x64 platforms.

In order to help our customers who are planning for the consolidation of their MySQL databases on systems running Solaris 10, we put together a document with a bunch of installation steps and the best practices to run MySQL inside a Solaris Container. Although the document was focused on the Solaris Containers technology, majority of the tuning tips including the ZFS tips are applicable to all MySQL instances running [on Solaris] under different virtualization technologies.

Sun published the PeopleSoft HRMS 8.9 Self-Service benchmark results today. The benchmark was conducted on 3 x Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000 and 1 x Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 servers. Click on the following link for the full report with the benchmark results.

Admittedly it is Sun's first PeopleSoft benchmark after a hiatus of over five years. However I am glad that we came up with a very nice cost effective solution in our comeback effort to the PeopleSoft applications' benchmarking.

Some of the notes and highlights from this competitive benchmark are as follows.

The benchmark measured the average search and save transaction response times at a peak load of 4,000 concurrent users.

4,000 users is the limitation of the benchmark kit. All vendors using this benchmark kit are bound to this limitation. Hence it is easy to compare the performance as the throughput achieved by each vendor will be the same. In comparing the benchmark results from workloads like these, lower average [transaction response times, CPU, memory utilizations] and the hardware in use (lesser the better), usually indicate better performance.

IBM and Sun are the only vendors who published benchmark results with PeopleSoft HRMS 8.9 Self-Service benchmark kit.

Sun's benchmark results are superior relative to IBM's best published result on a combination of z990 2084-C24 and eServer pSeries p690 servers. While I leave the price comparisons to the reader1, I'd like to show the performance numbers extracted from the benchmark reports published by Sun and IBM. All the following data/information is available in the benchmark reports. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

Average Transaction Response Times

Vendor

Single UserSearch (sec)

4,000 UsersSearch (sec)

Single UserSave (sec)

4,000 UsersSave (sec)

Sun

0.78

0.77

0.71

0.74

IBM

0.78

1.35

0.65

1.01

Average CPU Utilizations

Vendor

Web ServerCPU%

App Server1CPU%

App Server2CPU%

DB ServerCPU%

Sun

23.10

66.92

67.85

27.45

IBM

45.81

59.70

N/A

40.66

Average Memory Utilizations

Vendor

Web ServerGB

App Server1GB

App Server2GB

DB ServerGB

Sun

4.15

3.67

3.72

5.54

IBM

5.00

15.70

N/A

0.3 (Huh!?)

Hardware Configuration

Vendor: Sun Microsystems

Topology Diagram

Tier

ServerModel

ServerCount

Processor

ProcessorSpeed

ProcessorCount

#Cores perProcessor

Memory

Web

T5120

1

UltraSPARC-T2

1.2 GHz

1

4

8 GB

App

M3000

2

SPARC64-VII

2.52 GHz

1

4

8 GB

DB

M3000

1

SPARC64-VII

2.52 GHz

1

4

8 GB

2 x Sun Storage J4200 arrays were used to host the database. Total disk space: ~1.34 Terabytes. Consumed only 120 GB disk space -- 115 GB for data on one array; and 5 GB for redo logs on the other array.

The combination of Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000 and T5120 servers consumed 1030 Watts on the average in a 7RU space in achieving 4,000 concurrent users. That is, in the case of similarly configured workloads, M3000/T5120 support 3.88 users per watt of the power consumed; and 571 users per rack unit.

Just like our prior Siebel and Oracle E-Business Suite Payroll 11i benchmarks, Sun collaborated with Oracle Corporation in executing this benchmark. And we sincerely thank our peers at Oracle Corporation for all their help and support over the past few months in executing this benchmark.___________

I'm planning to post some of the tuning tips to run PeopleSoft optimally on Solaris 10. Stay tuned ..

The steps outlined in this blog post are derived from the Miscellaneous filesystem support for OpenSolaris on x86 web page. I just added few examples to illustrate the steps to mount a partition with NTFS filesystem that exists on the external hard drive (in this case, it is a Seagate FreeAgent external hard drive).

Mount the NTFS partition just like mounting an UFS filesystem using the mount command. Use the argument ntfs to the command line option -F. Since the filesystem was mounted in a slightly different way than the conventional way, use /usr/bin/xlsmounts to see the detailed mount table information.

Notice the 127.0.0.1:/ under ADDR column in the output of xlsmounts. NTFS mount uses userland NFSv2 server to access the filesystems on raw partitions. That is why the mount was shown as NFS client mounted from 127.0.0.1:/

To unmount the NTFS filesystem, use /usr/bin/xumount. Solaris standard umount command unmounts the filesystem but does not terminate the background NFS server process.

# ejecteject of cdrom /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s2 failed: A security policy in place prevents this sender from sending this message to this recipient, see message bus configuration file (rejected message had interface "org.freedesktop.Hal.Device.Storage" member "Eject" error name "(unset)" destination "org.freedesktop.Hal")